AB-MP4-1970-008 — Untitled (1970)

Technical information

Title : Untitled
Date : 1970
Technique : Pastel
Dimensions : 50 × 65 cm
Location : Private collection

Biographical / historical context

The year 1970 is among the densest of Breuillaud’s career: it sees the coexistence of highly saturated large oils and, in parallel, a series of works on paper in which colour and line gain autonomy.

These pastels—more open and more “breathing”—make it possible to follow the expansionary logic of the MP4 world in a less compact form, yet often more incandescent in its internal circulation.

The work belongs to this energetic facet of the year, where the surface becomes a field of heat and metamorphosis.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition is carried by a dominant red‑orange that floods the space in stratified veils, like slow fires or subterranean circulations rising to the surface.

Within this thermal climate, biomorphic figures emerge: ovoid heads with wide‑open eyes, serpentine bodies, folded silhouettes, fragments of animals or profiles—presences that appear and then are reabsorbed into the material.

A paler, elongated central form detaches itself like an upright entity amid a tangle of darker zones, while an upper circle hosts an embryonic scene suspended in a cooler pocket.

The drawing, incisive yet supple, does not merely outline: it sets off micro‑movements, connects distant fragments and opens depth within an otherwise frontal space.

Pastel is worked through superimpositions and rubbings, alternating velvety passages with darker densities; blue‑green and turquoise counterpoints cut across the heat and establish a particularly active warm/cool tension. The whole gives the impression of an organism in mutation, where forms are built through collisions, flows and reworkings rather than through stable volumes.

Comparative analysis / related works

Through its dispersed structure and its logic of punctuated membranes, the work can be related to AB‑MP4‑1970‑003 and AB‑MP4‑1970‑007, while departing from their more cartographic organisations.

Here, emphasis falls on incandescence and fragmentation, with a dramaturgy of the surface that, in the pastel medium, echoes the most charged nuclei of the 1970 corpus.

The piece stands out through a more instinctual energy—less “atlas”—and by the intensified contrast between burned zones and cooled counterpoints.

Justification of dating and attribution

The 1970 dating is supported by the use of pastel in superimposed layers within a range of burned reds and ochres characteristic of this year, as well as by the recurrent morphologies of the MP4 cycle—particularly ovoid heads and suspended figures.

Networks of line that organise without fixing correspond to the moment when Breuillaud experiments with the membrane as a principle of circulation rather than a stable envelope; the visible signature along the lower edge further anchors the sheet within the 1970 works on paper.